The badge says CEO. The job is stranger than that: convincing a city full of companies to unlock their front doors and call it a festival.
Most business events begin with a floor plan: a ballroom, a stage, a row of pull-up banners, and a name badge that doubles as a hall pass. NewCo, the company where Hanz Panther is listed as Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, starts somewhere else entirely. It starts with a calendar of open doors.
The model is known in the events world as "inside-out." Instead of pulling thousands of strangers into one rented hall, NewCo turns a whole city into the venue. Attendees pick sessions the way a music-festival crowd picks stages, then walk into the actual offices of actual companies to see how the work gets made. The host isn't a keynote speaker pacing a riser. The host is the building.
That idea is the spine of everything that follows. It changes what a ticket buys, what a sponsor sponsors, and what an organizer is even organizing. And it is the world Hanz Panther operates in, according to his public business listing: a Co-Founder and CEO title attached to a company that decided the conference center was the least interesting part of a conference.
Think about what a normal conference hides. The slick keynote is a finished product. You never see the messy standup, the whiteboard that contradicts itself, the engineer who disagrees with the roadmap. The inside-out format that NewCo is built on does the opposite. It sells access to the unfinished thing, the company while it is still arguing with itself.
That is a deceptively hard product to ship. A stage event has one address and one run-of-show. A city-wide festival has dozens of host companies, each with its own front desk, its own legal nerves about strangers wandering the floor, its own idea of what "hosting" means. Coordinating that is less like booking a venue and more like conducting an orchestra where every musician owns their own concert hall.
Run a business around that and the CEO job stops being about the show and starts being about trust. You are asking real companies to be vulnerable in public, on a schedule, in front of competitors and recruiters and the merely curious. The festival only works if enough of them say yes. Selling that yes, over and over, in city after city, is the quiet machinery behind a NewCo badge.
Strip away the festival romance and a business-event company is a logistics company wearing editorial clothes. Someone has to curate which companies are worth opening, sequence the schedule so two great sessions don't collide across town, keep sponsors happy without turning the whole thing into an ad, and make the numbers work on margins that live or die by attendance.
Panther's listing places him at the top of that machine as Co-Founder and CEO. The record points to a seed-stage, business-services operation - SIC code 7380, the catch-all for the unglamorous-but-essential work of making other businesses run. There's an Amazon AWS line in the tech stack, which is to say the festival in the physical world is backed by the usual cloud plumbing in the digital one. None of that is glamorous. All of it is the job.
It is also a job that spans three industries at once. NewCo lives in events, obviously. But it leans on media to tell the story of the companies it opens, and it sits squarely in publishing - the industry tag on Panther's record - because the festival is, at bottom, an act of editing: choosing whose doors are worth walking through and in what order.
The geography on the file tells its own small story. The company is headquartered in San Francisco - 1202 Ralston Ave, with a 415 phone line - while Panther himself is listed in New York. That coast-to-coast split is fitting for an events business: the West Coast is where the format was incubated, and the East Coast is where a lot of the audience, the media, and the money keep their offices.
For a festival company, being in two places isn't a contradiction. It's the product. A model that turns cities into venues needs people who live in those cities, who know which doors are worth knocking on and which sponsors will actually show up. A New York base for a San Francisco company reads less like a commute problem and more like coverage.
Some of the most telling things about a company hide in its handles. NewCo's presence on X runs under @newcofest, and its Facebook lives at newcofestivals - plural, on purpose. The word the company keeps reaching for isn't "summit" or "expo." It's "festival." That single vocabulary choice does a lot of work. A summit sounds like rows of chairs. A festival sounds like you'll miss something good if you stand still.
The keyword cloud attached to Panther's record reads like the table of contents for a modern business festival: policy, economy, technology, entrepreneurship, innovation, leadership, startup culture, digital media, social platforms, enterprise software, consumer internet. That's not a niche. That's a worldview - the belief that business, culture, and policy are the same conversation if you put them in the same room. Or, in NewCo's case, the same city.
And then there's the format's quiet philosophical edge. By choosing to open offices rather than build stages, an inside-out festival makes a claim about where the truth of a company lives. Not in the polished talk. In the workplace. It's a wager that people would rather see the kitchen than taste the plated dish - and that they'll pay for the privilege.
Live events are a brutal business. The revenue arrives in spikes around dates on a calendar, the costs are stubbornly fixed, and a single bad season - a venue falls through, a host company gets cold feet, a city's appetite cools - can swing the whole year. Layer the inside-out complexity on top, with dozens of independent hosts instead of one controlled hall, and the operational degree of difficulty climbs again.
That's the context worth holding onto when you read "Co-Founder & CEO" next to Hanz Panther's name. It isn't a ceremonial title on a stable cash machine. In a seed-stage events company built on one of the harder-to-execute formats in the category, the chief executive's daily reality is closer to plate-spinning than to ribbon-cutting. The festival looks effortless from the audience. That's the point. Effortless is the most expensive thing to manufacture.
What makes the bet interesting is that it refuses the easy version. NewCo could have been a normal conference with a clever name. Instead the format insists on the difficult promise - real doors, real offices, real people at their desks - because that difficulty is exactly what a competitor can't cheaply copy. The moat is the hassle. Few people choose to run toward the hassle. The ones who do tend to end up with a CEO title and a calendar full of cities.
Here's the honest accounting. We know the role, the company, the format, the geography, and the industries NewCo straddles. We don't have a verified personal biography for Hanz Panther - no confirmed schooling, no documented earlier chapters, no public interviews on the record. Data brokers will happily auto-fill those blanks with mismatched fragments. This profile doesn't, because a confident wrong answer is worse than an honest blank.
So take this as a portrait of a role and the world it sits in: a co-founder and chief executive inside one of the more contrarian ideas in business events. The detail that proves it isn't a quote or a trophy. It's the format itself - a festival that decided the best stage was the one you already walk into every morning. The work, after all, was always happening inside the building. NewCo just sold tickets to the inside.
The handle is @newcofest; the Facebook page is newcofestivals. The word choice signals the whole strategy - movement, not seating charts.
An SF company with a CEO in NYC. For a model that turns cities into venues, being in more than one city is a feature.
Amazon AWS sits in the stack. The festival happens in the physical world; the logistics run on the usual digital rails.